CI/CD Patterns

GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines automate testing, building, and deployment workflows. Define YAML workflow templates in your repository's .github/workflows directory to trigger on events like push or pull request, then configure jobs for linting, testing, coverage reporting, and Docker image builds.

Deployment strategies—Blue-Green, Canary, and Rolling Update—control how new versions reach production with minimal downtime. Blue-Green runs two identical environments and switches traffic instantly; Canary gradually routes traffic to new versions; Rolling Update replaces pods incrementally while maintaining service availability.

Multi-stage Dockerfiles reduce image size and build time by separating build dependencies from runtime artifacts. Each stage uses FROM to define a base, copies only necessary outputs to the final stage, and minimizes layers, resulting in faster deployment and lower storage costs.

GitOps with ArgoCD enables declarative deployment management by syncing Kubernetes specs from Git repositories automatically. ArgoCD monitors your Git source, detects configuration changes, and applies them to your cluster, providing version control, audit trails, and rollback capabilities.

Production deployments require health checks to verify service readiness, secret management for credentials and API keys, database migration handling before pod updates, and multi-stage workflows that test, build, and deploy sequentially with validation gates between stages.

Yes. GitHub Actions integrates with Docker registries to build and push images, and with Kubernetes clusters to deploy applications. Use action steps to authenticate, build images with docker build, push to registries, and deploy manifests using kubectl or GitOps tools like ArgoCD.